


Issue #0: Gaia, The Hero the Earth Deserves: Genesis

by PeterQuynce



Series: Rise of the New Heroic Age [1]
Category: HERO Champions
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Champions: Hero System, Gen, Hero system, Metahumans, Superheroes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-05 23:35:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11023935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeterQuynce/pseuds/PeterQuynce
Summary: The tragedy and triumph of Clarity Baum's transformation into the superhero known as Gaia.





	Issue #0: Gaia, The Hero the Earth Deserves: Genesis

**Author's Note:**

> This fiction is part of an ongoing role playing game being run by S.R. using the Hero system, 6th edition.

As she lay in the cold mud unable to move, Clarity Baum wondered how she had gotten here and why it was so dark. Her thoughts wandered around despite the heavy, wrong feeling in her chest. She was covered in dirt--- no, she was face down the mud with something on her back and she felt only the smallest movements in her fingers and eyelids. Part of her tried to piece together a diagnosis… was she paralyzed? Poisoned? Did she fall while climbing… what had she been doing last?

She remembered finally having a weekend off after finals. Working with Dr. Zinnia was amazing; his work with using plants to synthesize an enzyme to increase glucose uptake in cells could help make the latest cure for diabetes cheap enough to help first world and developing countries alike. She still couldn’t decide if she wanted to stay in research or go into medical school—she could just go back to research after, having that MD would give her more credibility. She thought about how cold she was and her wandering thoughts looped and came back to her current situation. I’m probably in shock, she thought, did she just have that thought a minute ago? She knew that was bad, but she couldn’t feel worried. Clarity wasn’t feeling very much at all except cold. 

She struggled to get up, to move and try to think about how this had happened. Clarity’s hands clutched and she attempted to push up: no leverage. Her back felt heavy, and her legs—she couldn’t really feel her legs. That worried her finally, trying to move her knees, ankles, toes… she tried to feel if she had hikers or sneakers on—nothing. Shit, shit, shit—not good, not good at all, she could feel some panic rise in her, the adrenaline clearing her head a little.

She smelled the mud, grass, and salt, then it came to her: she had gone kayaking and hiking after finals at the Channel Islands National Park. She remembered deciding to tackle the Montanon Ridge trail and that her friend Katie twisted her ankle and decided that she wanted to take the short route down to Smuggler’s Cove. Clarity had continued up into the hills to try to see a scrub-jay or island deer mouse. This was her second time visiting the Channel Islands and with her research and impending med school, she didn’t think she would get back her for a while. Last time her friends had wanted to stick to the easier hikes, and she had gone along. Not this time, she was going to see some indigenous fauna if it killed her. She paused in her weak efforts to move—maybe it had killed her. 

She started to feel pain in her stomach and ribs as she breathed faster, her body not quite able to pant, tasting the dirt in her mouth. She had been walking and she heard a shot and some kind of call or scream. She just started running toward the sound, mentally taking stock of her first aid kit and anything else she had in her pack that could be useful.  
She remembered the trail and the fine mist of rain, and then when she rounded a rock, there were three men and one of them had a gun. It was a ridiculous, chrome-plated pistol, like he had gone to the store and found the piece most like something in Grand Theft Auto. They couldn’t have been twenty-five and their pristine, top-end hiking equipment marked them as rich kids who we’re playing with Daddy’s credit card. 

They were laughing and one of them shouted, “That was a perfect shot man, you ripped those cats apart!” 

A guy with dirty hair in a black knit cap agreed, “No shit! They’re goddamn inside out, motherfucker!” 

“Two shots, two bodies!” crowed the boy with a sky-blue cap holding a semi-automatic pistol, swinging the gun around with the safety off. 

They were drinking and decided to start target shooting evidently. It was horrible, but she was going to turn around and just call the park rangers, then she saw the blood. It had been an island fox—how they had blundered into it, she would never know, but she could see the grey and red fur torn to shreds by their high-caliber bullet. A dead kit, barely recognizable as an animal lay beside it. The species of fox was newly off the endangered list and only found here in the Channel Islands. They were the smallest canids in the world, just four or five pounds. Clarity’s vision tunneled down and went red. She surged toward them and yelled, “You goddamn idiots! They were island foxes! They’re rare and beautiful and you jus—.“ Her breath caught as she took a bullet in the stomach and she wobbled and tried to not fall down. She looked up and the kid with the gun and he was looking shocked, and she could see that he had a bit of blood on his t-shirt where the huge pistol had kicked back and hit him in the chest.

When they grabbed her, she was already shocky and loosing blood fast. Her white camp shirt was turning red under her hand as she clutched at her wound. She tried to explain to them about her first aid kit and extra shirt for bandages, babbling uncontrollably. But instead of laying her down and applying pressure, they started dragging her off the trail. She was blacking out intermittently as one of them was arguing about something, the other two, who looked like brothers or cousins, dragged her remorselessly off. Someone yelled and the boys threw her into a gulley. Hitting the ground whited out her vision with pain. Something was thrown down and hit her back around the exit wound and she passed out. 

She remembered, but she was feeling drifty again and she thought she might be blacking out and not know it. It was dark as far as she could tell, so it had to be hours since she had been walking on the trail and she felt so cold and thirsty. She wasn’t sure if anyone was looking for her. Katie had found a blue eyed hiker named Kevin to help her limp down the trail to smuggler’s cove. She might have just gotten him to help her to the ferry, especially if the ankle was bad, or if Kevin was as nice as he seemed. Someone was bound to notice tomorrow, but tomorrow was a long time off. Clarity could be dead before dawn. 

She thought about her plans to be a doctor and the botanical research she would never see results from, her parents and her friends grieving: they were thoughts of cold, fear, and despair. When she thought about the idiots that did this and that poor fox—well, she hated what had happened, but she didn’t regret standing up for what she believed in. Those boys were acting like monsters, blighting the beauty of this place. She could still feel a distant version of the terrible rage she had toward them. Clarity remembered the love and wonder she felt for the Channel Islands when she came over on the ferry. The grief, anger, and joy filled her up and mingled with the salt, blood, and soil she could smell and taste: it was all one to her—she was of this place and in this place, and she was salt water and stone, a dead fox in the mud and a gull on the wind—there was only life.  
Suddenly, she felt a great thump through the mud. Earthquake? The tremor shook the ground beneath her in four steady beats: baaah…THUMP, baaaah…THUMP! It reminded her of a heartbeat, but bigger and slow. Then she felt another, tiny heart-beat pushing against the outside of her breastbone: ba-thump, ba-thump, ba-thump, and it just kept going in its staccato beat. It was her pendant, although it had somehow acquired a heartbeat like a mouse. She found the piece of petrified wood in a tide pool after she had gone surfing for the first time when she turned 16. It was carved with a simple tree of life and she had liked it immediately. She twisted some silver wire around it and wore it always.  
Now the wood-turned-stone seemed warm against her skin and trembled with a heartbeat. Her heart seemed to join in, beating faster to meet the quick rhythm. Under her palms she felt roots twist and twine, encircling her arms, chest, and more—it should have been terrifying, but it was so much warmer than before. Clarity felt held and protected, and slowly, more and more alive. She screamed as she felt her abdomen and legs again, the pain flaring hot before ebbing away. Her body was gently rolled over and moved up, she could see the stars and hear the ocean, even as the vines embraced her and the soft soil supported her back. 

She wondered if she was dying and this was a crazy dream; if that was true, it was the best thing she could have imagined. She could feel, smell, hear so much—she seemed to stretch forever and everywhere parts of her were swimming and flying, sleeping and running. The deep pull of the tides rolled through her and the sweet air curled around her, she was complete. She was transcendent—no, that was wrong—she felt earthly, omnipresent. 

And along with that joy, she started to feel… pain. Pieces of her were dying—and not the usually hatching and snatching of life and its cycles, this was something else. Species were disappearing at the rate of an ice age, but there was no glacial blanket. There were strange concentrations of minerals and chemicals which would normally be in traces and that focused onslaught was changing a river into a flowing wound. Lakes went mad with algae growth, choking the fish, reducing the other plants to slime. She was melting and the rising seas had a floating islands of twisting hardened petroleum, slimy but unyielding to the usual slow, smooth decay of ocean flotsam. Clarity could sense the teeming, seething mass of 7.5 billion humans, and the itch of their imbalance—some starved while others gorged. Humans warred with a shocking faction of the five million trillion, trillion bacteria, even though they could not live without those microbes. Millions of humans lived where the air was choking them with a smog that would not dissipate. Usually so quick and clever, humans were slowing down, turning on each other, living in insanity-inducing isolation—both forced and self-imposed.  
Clarity felt the sharp pain of radiation and her tiny self in the sea of data around her named it Chernobyl. The mind…machine…biosphere…goddess that she was connected to seemed to notice her and seemed to have a face that turned to Clarity, and Clarity felt read down to each and every cell. Clarity’s information about the disaster in Chernobyl became pulled into the greater being. The woman could sense the power and presence of this Earth, a goddess out of myth…but could also feel the power straining to maintain this reflection of Clarity herself, to think and communicate in a way that was remotely human, in a way that created an Other and Self. 

The woman struggled to help them communicate and connect, she gasped, “You are Gaia, I am Clarity.”

The entity that is the earth replied to Clarity in her mind—it was as if Clarity had a memory knowing the words but no sense of how they came to her through her senses. “We are Gaia, and you will bring Clarity. You will be...” impressions of the grabbing growth, the spinning flight of the seedpod on the wind, and the running, climbing, gnawing filled Clarity’s senses—clearly it was difficult for the Earth Mother to think in singularities, but even her simplest ideas were overwhelming. “My tendril, my new traveling tooth to tell me of That Which Gnaws from Beneath, my Gaia-Seed” 

“YES!” Clarity rang out, surging up from her green cocoon and appearing clothed resplendent in vines and thorny bark, crowned in yellow California poppies. Her living armor crisscrossed her body, heavily armoring her right arm and left leg, thickening around the spots that had so recently been injured by her gunshot wound and being thrown down that crevasse. Clarity could feel a helm grow around her head and branch off into antlers. She surged with joy and could sense her wings unfurl in dragonfly pairs, going from new spring green to harvest gold in a moment. She flew up and up into the starry sky, feeling the ocean swells as well as the air currents and the hurrying, scurrying of life everywhere. 

She descended back down to the island in lazy circles and found herself back in the spot on the Montanon trail. She found the chrome-plated gun, they had tossed it into the ditch with her body. She flicked the safety on and wrapped her vines around it so it stuck to her back out of the way. Although it was dark, she could still see the body of the fox, gory and broken. She reached out a single finger to touch some of the unblemished grey fur and she could sense it—the smallest spark of life in the gutted body, still fighting in the cold and dark. Vines grew and flowed around the tiny body, cocooning it and lending her strength, feeding the vixen the energy that she needed to replenish herself. The flesh and bone pulled back into place, re-growing and becoming whole again, in a few minutes, only shorter fur marked the former wound site. Clarity felt a moment of pure joy as she truly healed another creature; for just a moment, she felt reconnected to everything. We are Gaia, she thought, I am Gaia. 

The fox sprang up and searched around, sniffing until she found her dead kit. The vixen gave a small distressed sound and ran away, fleeing from the small corpse. Clarity’s thoughts turned to the men who had done this. Dragging her off and hiding the body, that had not been done by panicked kids. Her memories were not very clear, but she remembered that the only one of those boys who was scared was the stupid one with the gun. The other two were into something seriously criminal to be that cold-blooded. She was going after those monsters, but she was not going to be easy prey this time she thought, as her hands tightened into fists. She realized then that she was now covered in thorns. By instinct she flexed her arm and a thorn shot out and stuck into tree like an arrow. Well, that’s bound to come in handy, she thought, smiling to herself in the moonlight. She sprung into the air and flew up and off, determined to find her attackers and bring them to justice. 

She skimmed across the waters, enjoying the ocean spray against her face as she raced toward the shores. She thought it was likely that the boys hadn’t gotten far. There was a bar scene over on High Street with a few Strip joints at the seedier end. Yes, there the brothers were, one of them throwing up just outside the Pink Starfish. Yuck, he had drunk something really blue, no wonder he was so sick. The third guy, the shooter, was not around. She worried a little over the fate of the trust fund kid—not that she had a lot of sympathy for someone who had murdered two foxes and a person out of sheer carelessness-- but the more she thought about it, the more it seemed to her that the other two would not hesitate too much to shut up the third if they thought he might get them arrested. 

She hovered about forty feet above the two men, and paused to think. How to get them somewhere quiet to find out what happened to the shooter? The scene from her childhood favorite, the Wizard of Oz flashed in her mind, she could hear the wicked witch cackle lovingly about, “poppies, beautiful poppies.” She felt another flash of connection and an understanding in a being much greater than herself, and she watched as odd, sparkling pollen began to drift down from her crown of flowers onto the figures below. She admitted feeling some satisfaction as they landed face down in some of that bluish pile of vomit, which didn’t wake them from their pollen-induced slumber.  
When the young men woke up, the world was upside-down, and the girly drink guy promptly threw up again—he was not projecting enough and got quite a bit in his eyebrows and hair—not pretty. “What’s happening? Who are you?” the soberer one yelled.  
“You are hanging from a tree and answering my questions, and if you don’t remember me, just think of me as another woman who thinks you are worthless scumbags,” Clarity explained. “How’s your vision doing? The longer you hang upside-down, the more blood pressure starts to push on your eyes. They’re looking a bit froggy now, I wonder what another hour might bring? You will probably start of have trouble breathing at that point…” She knew that those symptoms would actually take a bit longer to appear, but like most people, fear brought out the psychosomatic symptoms in both of them, and they started to breath faster and blink a lot. 

“Where is your Richie Rich friend? The one in the light blue ski cap." 

“We don’t know anyone named Rich, Jungle Bitch.” 

“Great, you’ve made up your own creepy version of Dr. Seuss. Mom must be so proud.” She touched the vines encircling them and sent the two of them spinning. Blue drink drunk started dry heaving and the other looked ready to vomit soon. There was a rustling sound as Clarity grew her foliage a little more. “Let me bring things into better focus for you,“ she said as she stilled their spinning. She scuffed a spot in the dirt and flicked on a stainless-steel zippo lighter she had found in in the drunk’s pocket, tossing it down so that she was lit from below as she bent down on one knee. She bristled with thorns, her armor jagged and strange, antlers branching off into the darkness. Very quietly she said, “I want to know his name and what happened to your little friend. You might think that sharing that information will put you in a tight spot, but I assure you, she gestured to the vines around them and they began to squeeze,” it will get a lot tighter a lot sooner if you do not share his location.”

The bigger, drunker one started to panic and try to thrash around, this only made him spin and start to hyperventilate. She was considering if she should drug him unconscious again, just to prevent him hurting himself, but Clarity was leery of putting too much of the soporific into his system. 

Then his brother cracked. “Hey, stop it, stop it—he can’t breathe, you have to let him out he’s claustrophobic, he’ll have a heart attack.”

“Talk to me about your missing friend and then I’ll let him down. Tick, tick, though, I think he’s turning purple.”

“Stop it, we don’t know exactly where he is right now,” the less drunk brother insisted. 

The other stopped dry heaving and called out, “We dumped him off the ferry. He cried like a baby and was going to tell everyone what happened, so we had to shut him up. We hit him in the head and dumped him in the ocean.” 

Clarity held the drunk still for a moment with a hand on cheek, then turned the back of her hand towards his cheek so he could feel the slightest scrape of thorns, “His name?”

“Dante…Dante Breven!”

“Good boy,” Clarity said. She stopped his spinning and released them from the tree so they fell a few inches and flopped down. They were two lumpy pods on the ground, one of them cursing softly to himself, the other taking gasping but slower breaths than before. She rooted them down so they couldn’t inchworm anywhere. Clarity pulled out a cell phone and called 911.

“Like, I don’t know what’s going on, but like there are two guys in Laredo park and they’re shouting that they’re stuck. Maybe there’s a hole or something, but like it’s really dark over there and I didn’t want to go into the park at night, but they’ve been yelling for like five minutes straight.” Clarity kicked the soberer brother and he yelled something intelligible. “So I’ve got to go home, but someone will check up on them, right?”

She flew off but circled back around, twisting her vines a little less big-and-thorny and got into her Prius to wait and watch. The police showed up in five minutes, she was a bit impressed really. The officers were cautious, but the groans from the two men drew them to the right spot. She listened and as she focused on them, it was as if she was standing with them instead fifty feet away. 

“There was this bug girl super, she attacked us, said the smarter brother, I thought she was going to kill my brother John.”

“She was a crazy devil thing, I thought she was going to cut out my eyes,” the drunk whined. 

She realized that she needed to be there, to tell the story that they wouldn’t. Clarity didn’t know why she ever thought that it would be otherwise—she was involved whoever these guys were, they didn’t have a conscience. Like dad says, “stand up for something, or fall for anything.” She layered on her vines to cover a bit more skin since she her clothes had fallen apart earlier in the evening. 

Clarity decided to fly, it was bound to cut down on the questions like “are you a real super or just a crazy cosplayer?” Hello, Officers, she called in a friendly voice.  
“Stop, identify yourself!” the young white officer yelled as he drew his gun. The older black officer looked commanding but kept his weapon in the holster.  
She hovered back a few feet, worried about being shot twice in one night. Her armor became more bark-covered and shielded her chest and torso. “I am…Gaia, I called for you because these young men have murdered a boy named Dante Breven while on the Channel Island ferry.” They had this gun on them—she used her vines to let the gun flow down her back and leg and let it drop to the ground as she kept her arms up. 

The brothers started to shout— “hey, that’s not ours! We didn’t do anything, she’s lying!”

Gaia grew some leafy muzzles to quiet them. 

“How do you know?” said the black officer. “Did you witness the murder?” He still kept his right hand on his weapon, but he seemed interested in talking. 

I heard them talking about it, bragging. I decided to have a private chat and found the gun and realized they might have really done it. Then I called you in.” 

“You’ll need to come down to the station and make a statement,” said the younger officer with an air of belligerence. 

Gaia bobbed in the air with a little shrug, “I’m sorry but, I have to get going. Work tomorrow, you know?” And with that, she zipped off into the darkness. Crap, I’ll have to go back for my car tomorrow, she thought and she flew home in the moonlight, feeling the caress of the cool night air, and listening to the susurrus of the palm leaves and the sea.


End file.
